Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been in the works for some time now. And there has been quite a bit of debate over it. I've been following along, of course, but it's just been too tedious to report on. The basic gist was that IE 8 makes great strides toward standard compliance. Yay. But you were only going to get the standards compliant version of IE 8 if you specifically requested standard compliant rendering in your web page - otherwise IE 8 would just render your HTML in the same slightly screwy way that IE 7 did. WTF? It's like reverse quirks mode.
Microsoft's position was that if they suddenly made IE 8 standard compliant then all those web pages specifically authored to work in IE 7 (or worse, 6) would suddenly break when viewed in IE 8. And they didn't want to "break the web." I guess I see their point, but I just wish they'd do it right so that everyone could eventually move on and stop having web design be such a complete mess.
And low and behold, today Microsoft announced they are reversing themselves, and IE 8 will now render in standard compliant mode by default. You can optionally request IE 7 mode if you want, but if not you get the new rendering engine. This is going to break a lot of pages but it is a very good thing for the web in general. Way to go Microsoft. Truly a great day.
Looks like Ray Ozzie is having a good impact up in Redmond.
Yay is right.
Sadly, it will be necessary to support MSIE 6 and MSIE 7 for a few more years (MSIE... pronounced "Misery").
I need IE on my windows machine primarily because 1 out of 50 or a 100 web sites refuse to work with FireFox. Usually it's not a straight rendering issue, but something that involves some form of scripting. Weirdness. E.g., I won't be able to make a purchase because some pop up is non-functional.
Agreed about the "misery", although IE 7 is not so so bad. And at least I can feel a little better about completely ignoring 5 now that 8 is coming out. I'd like to just ignore them all though.
And yes, definitely some sites are built only on IE with no other testing - especially complex scripted sites. I guess that's sort of the opposite of how I'd like to do it, so I can't honestly complain too much.
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Microsoft's position was that if they suddenly made IE 8 standard compliant then all those web pages specifically authored to work in IE 7 (or worse, 6) would suddenly break when viewed in IE 8. And they didn't want to "break the web." I guess I see their point, but I just wish they'd do it right so that everyone could eventually move on and stop having web design be such a complete mess.
And low and behold, today Microsoft announced they are reversing themselves, and IE 8 will now render in standard compliant mode by default. You can optionally request IE 7 mode if you want, but if not you get the new rendering engine. This is going to break a lot of pages but it is a very good thing for the web in general. Way to go Microsoft. Truly a great day.
Looks like Ray Ozzie is having a good impact up in Redmond.
- jim 3-04-2008 6:14 pm
Yay is right.
Sadly, it will be necessary to support MSIE 6 and MSIE 7 for a few more years (MSIE... pronounced "Misery").
- ...g 3-04-2008 6:55 pm
I need IE on my windows machine primarily because 1 out of 50 or a 100 web sites refuse to work with FireFox. Usually it's not a straight rendering issue, but something that involves some form of scripting. Weirdness. E.g., I won't be able to make a purchase because some pop up is non-functional.
- mark 3-04-2008 10:02 pm
Agreed about the "misery", although IE 7 is not so so bad. And at least I can feel a little better about completely ignoring 5 now that 8 is coming out. I'd like to just ignore them all though.
And yes, definitely some sites are built only on IE with no other testing - especially complex scripted sites. I guess that's sort of the opposite of how I'd like to do it, so I can't honestly complain too much.
- jim 3-05-2008 8:32 pm